Have you ever driven an American car?You get the high maintenance *and* the shit fuel economy - but not only that, you get poor braking and handling, lacklustre performance *and* poor ergonomics and aesthetics!Now how's that for a package?

As an early 2000's Land Rover owner myself, I can say I have a love hate relationship with it. I do proper off-roading with it and abuse it royally. The things that fail are all small things and the things that should not fail (such as window regulators, door openers/locks, switches, ABS/Traction control electronics, plastic bits etc.) - The odd thing about that is they seem to be targeting the american users who only want the a luxury vehicle - pushing users to all the things that will fail on it...Now it

mostly because the gov't is forcing them too. The increased fuel economy and safety requirements raised the price of cars so much it wasn't worth making junk. Read consumer reports and you'll find they US and Japanese cars are pretty close, if not identical.

German cars? You mean like the BMW One Series that's oh so popular in the UK but were a common site completely failing to get up anything more than a horizontal plane when the tiniest bit of snow fell with their excuse being "Oh you need snow tyres" whilst the Jaguar and Land Rover drivers just drove on past them with their normal tyres chuckling to themselves?

Or perhaps they should've gone for lovely Japanese Toyotas, because it's not like Toyota has ever had any recalls or anything.

I live in a posh neighbourhood, and a lot of people have BMWs. One chap bucks the trend by driving a tiny little Fiat Panda 4x4 [youtube.com]. last winter a lot of BMWs failed to make it up the hill out of our estate. This guy doesn't even clear his driveway, he just drives out. I felt really glad that he had his day! ,br>
In winter rear wheel drive really sucks.

BMW DOES make AWD vehicles (they are the models that have an X or XI in them). More important then going forward is braking and handling which neither FWD, RWD or AWD has an advantage in low traction... there is no substitute to winter tires. If you actually owned a BMW with 50-50 weight balance and winter tires, you'd realize they are actually really awesome in the snow. The fact your posh neighbours can't make it up the hill is probably more tire choice then anything.

I've driven an American car, in fact I've driven a couple of them. It gets pretty tedious trying to keep up with normal UK motorway traffic with that 6.5 litre engine banging off the rev limiter at 80mph.

China is still shit are car design if their version of MG/Rover is anything to go by. Luckily the western version of MG is still being designed in the UK

Remember hyow bad Korean cars were? They'd never be as good as Japanese cars, which would never be as good as American cars in the 50s, 60s, which would never be as good as British cars, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam

Jaguar died as a brand in 1987, when Ford took them over. From there, they've largely rested on prior laurels. That said, most pre-1987 Jaguars were a cult. You could tell when one was really dead because it stopped leaking.

You can still get 50grand on eBay (++) for a 50's xk120/140. But the days of glory are largely gone, as they not only don't hold their value, but never achieved Ford's reliability goals, let alone Tata's.

The Mini Cooper is an example of a brand redone, but bettered, by BMW. Nominally made in Oxford (some elsewhere), it's an international effort that makes a stellar little ride, if deeply in a niche. Of course it helps to have a couple of popular movies featuring your car's ability to descend stairs and make wicked turns.

I live around the corner from one of them. They've just spent god-only-knows how many millions re-tooling it for production of the new Evoque. I'd be very surprised if production of that went anywhere else for a while

China is the world's largest car market having recently overtaken the US

Largest potential market, surely? On a recent episode of Top Gear (2012), they said they have about 58M cars in total for the whole of China. Well in line with what's on Wikipedia for 2009: 40 motor vehicles per 1000 people.

Even if people are talking about market value (price x quantity) I don't think China's auto market is more valuable than that of the USA?

"The Mini Cooper is an example of a brand redone, but bettered, by BMW."

Rubbish, The "Mini Cooper" as reimagined by BMW is a fat slug designed for Bavarians and the US market.

Compared with the Issigonis Mini, its an appaling 21st century lump, with the style and visual appeal of a road accident. Like the current "Fiat 500" its an insult to the vehicle it allegedly draws its inspiration from. Here's a thought for you. I followed a BMW "Mini" yesterday. Between it and me was an original, 44 year old Mini

The MINI Cooper was great while designer Frank Stephenson was at the helm, but once he was lured away to Ferrari the Germans had no idea what to do with the model. They replaced its spunky engine with a boring, flat torque curve Bavarian engine, and made a mess of Stephenson's elegant lines. BMW may have helped revive the brand, but they proceeded to ruin everything good about it.

The Mini Cooper is an example of a brand redone, but bettered, by BMW.

Yes, but....

My girlfriend has a late model Mini Cooper S. It still has some weird spots. For example, if someone pulls too hard on the door handle, rather than pulling it twice to unlock then open, it will fuck up the latch assembly. That's not the part at the handle, it's actually at the back of the door. I've had to fix hers twice, when passengers didn't know to pull twice, and broke it.

I own a Mini S. It's not bad. It retains its value, and the prior owner got to sort out the bad stuff. It's odd. It's not a Hillman, it's not quite British, but it can keep up with the very best of them on a slalom run.

IMHO, the original Sir Wm Lyons Jags had style, and strange internal design. IRS suspension was a wonderment. The 3.8 and 4.2 engines were ill-fitted, but a good one lasted a while.

Post Ford acquisition, they were butt ugly. Then they increased the warranty, and probably cost Ford billions. T

I own a Mini S. It's not bad. It retains its value, and the prior owner got to sort out the bad stuff.

It definitely retains it's value. My girlfriend's is still worth quite a bit. She has the advantage of not driving it much, and it stays in the garage, so it's in great condition. My cars get the driveway, so they get birdshit bombed.:)

Since it's FWD, it has bad torque steer. My performance car is a slightly modified '00 TransAm WS/6, that I've been driving for 10 years, and have drive over 100,000 m

I've owned too many cars. I'll agree that the differential causes rapid torque rise offsets that translate to unmanageability. Turning off the auto-adjustments seems to make little difference, although you might try it to see if you like the control better.

I've been wondering about chipping it, and changing the table in several places. I'm tempted. But it's one more project in an endless list of projects, including a 70 VW Wesfailia (pun intended) and a couple of motorcycles. For now, I have only impulse ne

In reading around on the Cooper S, it looks like the better mods are to swap out the supercharger pulley and header to the cat.

We were diagnosing some misbehaving with hers, and I had my tablet reading the OBDII via bluetooth (gotta love the bluetooth OBDII reader). I noticed the supercharger really doesn't do anything until you're very close to redline.

From what I read, the headers tubes are a bit small for the application. There are kits that contain both

Since Ford sold them, they have completely redesigned their entire lineup. The truly bad car - the Ford Mondeo-based X series - is completely gone. They have a brand new mid-range sedan - the XF - which is selling well worldwide, competes head-on with the BMW 5-series, but is $10K less expensive. A lightly modified XF went over 225 MPH at Bonneville, and their cars are being raced in the LeMans series. A totally new sports car is being introduced this summer.

The Mini is only owned by BMW as a brand. Most are made in Oxford, of French, German, even US parts. The profit originally went to BMW. The rest went to the local dealer, and it's British only in the majority of its assembly labor.

Most Mini owners I know, in the US where I live, have mostly very good things to say about them. There are various minor complaints, but overall satisfaction in my anecdotal sampling say they're happy. So am I.

Our experiences differ vastly. I've restored them. I can tell you that in certain areas, Ford did indeed uprate the car. Might have been more reliable. And it wasn't Jaguar-- it was an empty brand. Ford then stole several Jaguar design features (look at the Mercury Sable for a starter).

Jaguar owners look at people that changed the drive trains with distain. Their cars, the ones with the 350s and T400s, were called "lumps". I didn't have to tune or adjust valves (??) on the 3.8 and 4.2s that I owned. The eng

China will give you the build quality you ask for. People go to China to build cheaply, so "cheap" is the most important parameter. Then they get all confused when "cheap" (cost) ends up being "cheap" (quality).

The iPhone had more trouble with poor design (antenna issues) than any build issues. "Cheap" wasn't the primary concern for Apple. Flexibility and capability were higher. I've not seen anything on the Apple Foxconn products that indicate quality issues.

I've never figured out why the public buys the "china is poor quality" when the products are designed, sourced, sold and supported by Wal-Mart (or whoever) and they suck, so Wal-Mart just says "china" and everyone seems satisfied.

China will give you the build quality you ask for. People go to China to build cheaply, so "cheap" is the most important parameter. Then they get all confused when "cheap" (cost) ends up being "cheap" (quality).

Very true, and this is not just for tech gadgets. Pretty much the entire astronomy industry is currently manufactured in China. Hell I've read Celestron is owned by a Chinese company. Celestron, Meade, Orion pretty much have all their equipment made in China, and to call any of their equipment unreliable or poor could not be further from the truth.

The problem with working with the Chinese is battling through the bullshit. One of our engineers tried to buy a valve from China one day. When he asked about certification documents, the company replied with something along the lines of, "What certification would you like us to fake for you?" in only slightly less obvious words. I had a similar experience with water filters. I've never seen a TUV certificate use numbers like 100% on anything, yet the certificate applied with this "TUV certified" filter was covered with 100% numbers. Yes it was cheap.

You get what you pay for. This applies to consumers and to businesses looking for a manufacturing plant, and China can supply both.

They are only moving assembly to China for the Chinease market. Shipping made cars two per container from the UK is not feasible. Everyone in Europe, America, Africa etc will still get the British made cars.

TFA is fud. The factory near where I live in Birmingham is recruiting like crazy. Soon to open a new engine plant in Wolverhampton too.

Parts for cars come from all over the world now anyway. Assembly doesn't employ many people compared to R&D, sourcing, etc.

What does "last vestiges of the truly British automobile in the States" mean? Does it mean something different than "last vestiges of the truly British automobile in the world." Or does this stupid sentence mean something else stupid?

It's not the sentence that's stupid, just the ignorant reader that's stupid. TVR is still a "British company" (though owned by a Russian). But TVR doesn't sell in the US. The US has restrictive rules designed to be barriers to entry, so the US doesn't get many low-run models, and there are still some specialty UK makers that are available in the UK, or abroad in locations more open to specialty cars.

So this, being explicitly a US site, is discussing the US effects of this, not the UK (or world) effects.

I bought my car based partly on its country of origin. More accurately, one of the contenders was eliminated because it's made in Mexico and I didn't feel the company had been building cars there long enough to have a proven track record. If they'd been building the car in their home country, it would have stayed on the list longer and may have been my final choice.

In a sort of way, I did buy my car based on the nationality of its brand.

I like Italian cars a lot, from the high-end ridiculous supercars and in particular all the way down to their basic, characterful people's cars, like the original Fiat 500. But we have owned a number of Fiats in my family and I know all to well about the reliability and rust problems that have always plagued them.

So when I saw they had started building cars in Poland, I took notice. Contrary to popular belief, Poland is a proud, hard-working, honest and straight-forward nation with a history of solid (if unsophisticated) engineering. It was only during WW2 and the Cold War that Poland took a serious nosedive, but they've certainly been doing everything they can to get themselves out of the shadow of combined Nazi+Soviet oppression.

I have been driving my Polish-built Fiat for nearly 5 years now and I have not had a single problem with it. Mechanically, electrically etc. it has been completely flawless.

I've certainly heard of people who seek cars made in a certain country, but does anyone actually value this more than whether their car is a piece of shit?

I've owned two American cars in my life. A 1988 Pontiac Firefly, which was basic transportation, and very good on gas. I was driving it in high school, and for my limited means at the time, it made sense. It's also a car that can't be made any more, because it would never pass modern safety standards. Those same safety standards would add a significant amount of weight to the car, and it would never get the mileage that it used to, even if they were to remake it.

The second American car I owned was a 2007 Chev Aveo. That was complete unadulterated shit. It was a terrible ride, it was not as good on gas as they advertised, it was uncomfortable, it handled like you were driving through a lake, in all, it was a terrible car. For the time that I owned it, it was in for several major repairs, including one where I was without car for 2 weeks... the dealer fixed me up with a Pontiac Grand Prix as a loaner for that 2 week period. That car had a better interior, but it was still low quality/plasticky, it still handled like you were driving through a lake, and it was even worse on gas.

Contrast that with the numerous Japanese cars I have owned... I have never had a major repair on any of the Subarus I have owned, despite having more than a million km's between them. My 2011 Impreza is immensely better in ride quality and handling than any American car I've ever driven, and it actually gets the gas mileage that they advertised for the Aveo, even though it's got all-wheel drive and I'm not even trying to drive it efficiently. And it's not just Subaru that I can say that about... in my family, we have owned Honda and Toyota cars that we can say the same about.

While there are certainly European brands that I would buy if I could get them here, I would never consider buying an American car until the Americans figure out how to make a car that goes around corners. In the mean time, I have never had a bad experience with a Japanese car, and would definitely recommend them to anybody looking for a car. It's not that individual American cars which are good don't exist, it's that most of the "good" American cars are actually European or Japanese designed/built and just rebadged.

Still a Japanese design, with Japanese specs, though, so the point stands... though interestingly (and perhaps it proves the point), the Legacy is a 2004, back from when GM had its talons in Subaru, and their car has the worst automatic transmission I have ever driven... downshift lag is at least 4-5 seconds when you try accelerating, and it seems that whoever designed the thresholds for upshifting was drunk, as they're not consistent at all. I do

It is funny that both of your American cars were not American at all. The Pontiac Firefly was originally a Suzuki (cultus or something). Chevy Aveo is a Daewoo Kalos. The Aveo was never meant to be a US Spec car, it worked OK in Asia where it is used over smaller distances and the weather is OK. Nevertheless, it was one of the cars that put Daewoo out of business.

Not forgetting the Evoke made in Halewood near Liverpool. New engine plant will be in Wolverhampton.

R&D in China. The engine technology from Ford and PSA Peugeot Citroën would not be allowed to be manufactured or assembled in China so they are having to design new engines. Similar to Focus in America are manufactured in Mexico. PSA Peugeot Citroën and others such as Mazda do not allow their technologies to be built in Mexico. The Focus in America stayed on the Mk1 platform and engines for 12 y

That's really the foundation of China's booming manufacturing industry. As national business models go, it works very well. It does mean exploitation and pollution, but some people in the Chinese government must have decided that the economic benefits are worth it. They were probably right - without the forign investment in industry and the economic strength from exports, they might still be just another third-world country getting by on rice-farming and memories of the glory days when they could claim to

It's an industrial revolution - it was no different in UK during ours. It's just easier to document in the 21st century. China is gradually creating a middle class, and will work itself out of the current boom. Regulations will come in, wages will increase, pollution will become more of an issue.

For some reason, it still blows my mind that it can be cheaper to manufacture a vehicle and then transport it halfway across the world than it could be to manufacture the vehicle locally.

I'd tend to agree with you, but then we would overestimate the real-world cost of transportation. If transport halfway across the globe is feasible for oil, bananas & cheap plastic toys, why would it not be feasible for high-tech products like electronics, cars etc?

The linked blog article reports roughly 20% of the full story. In actual fact, the UK factories are maxed out and employing more and more people, and only production destined for the Chinese market is being moved to China as part of this joint venture.

^This graphic is many years out of date, but it'll give you an idea of the complicated relationships that car manufacturers have.When it comes down to it, the car companies that aren't partially owned by one another are all cross licensing technology and sharing engines or chassises with one another.

Tata Motors [wikipedia.org] is a subsidiary of the Tata group [wikipedia.org]. The latter is worth at least USD100B which makes it larger than BMW. The former and its subsidiaries also make everything from lorries, buses, and heavy lifting equipment to a number of other road cars besides the Nano. The Nano is in many ways considered a relative failure in India and it's their other cars which are more popular.

While export might be a possibility, the article clearly mentions that the Chinese domestic market alone demands 40000 imported JLR models which will very likely increase dramatically when they are produced locally and sold with cheaper price tags. A little googling would have also revealed [liverpooldailypost.co.uk] that China is fast becoming the company's largest market and that JLR is expanding its factories in England and hiring more people.

If anybody needed an example of FUD, the OP would be an apt candidate.

Jaguar have topped JD Power Satisfaction rankings, and many other rankings, on and off for years now. The unreliable ones you're talking about were made in the 70s and 80s by, effectively, British Leyland.

Things looked up in the early 90s when Ford took over. They started bringing modernised toolsets to the construction process, and as a result reliability started climbing. It has continued climbing until it is now well ahead of <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mercedes%20reliability&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8">Mercedes</a>, for example, which is trotted out often as some form of reliability paragon.

It takes a long time to change reputation, that's the problem. That reputation didn't match reality as of about 1995 onwards (possibly slightly earlier) with the dumping of the XJ40 and the move to the X300 design (still marketed as XJ6/XJ8), but people still trot out what they once heard in a bar or from their dad. It's annoying - drop it. Jaguars are as reliable, if not more so, as anything else in their class.

Personally I've owned XJ40 and X300-type XJ6 cars (one a Sovereign, one an XJR). I've owned an X-Type and an S-Type, and am currently contemplating an older XF. During the same time period a friend of mine has owned BMWs and Audis - we've spent about the same on garage bills (an RS8 being a notable exception - bills dwarfed anything I'd seen on the Jags). The X and the S were fine, the XJ40 electrically temperamental, the X300 (XJR) was just superb.

JLR is actually doing rather well at the moment. The vehicles are UK designed, and JLR is taking on large numbers of staff in the UK to do more design work. I know several ex-colleagues who went to work there.It is because of the growing Chinese market, that some assembly of vehicles will be added in China, not due to the costs in the UK.Now that British/American style management has been removed from JLR, there is much better long term planning, and much stronger investment in the product line.If I was working for JLR, I'd much happily work under Indian management, rather than the mediocre bean-counting 'business degree' incompetents, who ran all of the indigineous British car industry into the ground.Of course, matters are even worse in the United States. The US car companies still have this type of management, and are completely bankrupt hulks, with terrible product lines. I am shocked, on every visit to the United States, just how bad their vehicles are.

I was shopping for a car last night, and while reading stickers was struck that the Honda Pilot actually has more domestic parts than the Dodge Durango, and not by a little bit. I knew that this was at least potentially true, but was really struck when I saw it on the label.

I don't really care who owns the company, because they're just fat cats (and can starve for all I care.) I care who actually gets the middle class jobs involved in auto manufacturing.

As many have pointed out, they aren't moving production, they're simply creating NEW production sites in China. The cost of importing is crazy high and so due to Chinese Law, have to forma JV to reduce the tax cost. Most of the German brands already do this so it's not unheard of or new. Pretty much all of these built vehicles will remain in China rather than exported.

In actual fact, the really rich Chinese would probably still import the vehicles because there is a brand image and greater snobbishness fo

Funny how the Chinese use tariffs to protect their industries and their economy is booming while our leadership bleats "unfettered trade, no taxes!" and our economy is declining and our government going bankrupt. Surely the communist Chinese are adhereing to the lenin axiom "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Our pie-eyed leadership is so focused on short term greed that they cannot see the long term threat.

The Morgan Motor Company is a British motor car manufacturer. The company was founded in 1910 by Harry Frederick Stanley Morgan, generally known as "HFS" and was run by him until he died, aged 77, in 1959.[1] Peter Morgan, son of H.F.S., ran the company until a few years before his death in 2003. The company is currently run by Charles Morgan, the son of Peter Morgan.

Morgan is based in Malvern Link, an area of Malvern, Worcestershire and employs 163 people. Morgan produced 640 cars in 2007. All the cars are assembled by hand. The waiting list for a car is approximately one to two years, although it has been as high as ten years in the past.

There is also Bristol [wikipedia.org], although it sounds like they aren't building cars at the moment:

Bristol Cars is a manufacturer of hand-built luxury cars headquartered in Patchway, near Bristol, United Kingdom. Bristol have always been a low-volume manufacturer; the most recent published official production figures were for 1982, which stated that 104 cars were produced in that year. While no official figures have been produced since then it is believed[by whom?] that in recent years production has been around 20 cars per annum.

Unlike most speciality automakers, Bristol does not court publicity and has only one showroom, located on Kensington High Street in London. Nevertheless the company maintains an enthusiastic and loyal clientele.

The company suspended manufacturing in March 2011, when administrators were appointed and 22 staff were made redundant. In April 2011, the company was purchased by the Kamkorp Group.

TVR was very British up until they stopped production... Jaguar and Land Rover rank a lot lower on the British scale to this car guy.